Friday 7th February 2025

There was a definite sense of spring in the air this lunchtime.  We started by me getting the children to shut their eyes and listen to a clip I had recorded from the previous night on my phone.  Shutting your eyes is a good way to heighten your hearing senses.  They all recognized it as the hoot of an owl, but disagreed about whether it was male or female and why it was calling.  We soon dispensed with the idea that it was so they could catch prey, as the prey would hear them and run away. No single owl calls t-wit two.  I explained that this was a male most likely calling  to a female or telling other males this was his patch.  The male make the t-woo sound, whilst the female makes the answering t-wit.  This then led to a discussion over by the stumps about how owls are adapted to catch their food.  The owl in question was in fact a tawny owl and I began to tell the children about how many owls are native to the country.  By the end of the session I got them to tell me all the facts they had learnt.  So, here goes.  They remembered that there are 5 native owls: Tawny, Barn, Short-eared, Long-eared and Little.  They described how a Tawny owl can turn its head 270 degrees and how its eyesight in the dark is so much better than a humans (because they have one million light rod cells per square millimetre in their eyes, compared to only 200,000 per square millimetre in humans). Their eyes are also much bigger than ours and therefore let in more light.  Human eyes only make up 0.0003% of their weight, whereas an owl’s accounts for a staggering 5%.  Although owls have no sense of smell, their ears are amazing.  Since they have one ear higher than the other (asymmetrical), they are able to pinpoint their prey exactly.  Finally, their soft fringe feathers mean they are silent flyers, so that their prey cannot hear them coming.  Their sharp talons and beak mean that they can kill their prey quickly and humanely.  After all of that, we filled the bird feeders up, shared stories of other nature encounters they had enjoyed and sat looking around us.  We were treated by visits from robins, sparrows and blue tits, as well as a red kite soaring overhead.